Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald is a British writer, naturalist, and falconer. She studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and later completed a doctorate in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge. She has worked as a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and as a researcher in the history of science. H Is for Hawk (2014), her memoir about training a goshawk while grieving her father's death, became one of the most celebrated British nature-writing books of the twenty-first century. It won the Costa Biography Award and the Costa Book of the Year 2014, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. It is credited with renewing popular interest in both falconry and literary nature writing. Macdonald has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, and numerous other publications on nature, science, and culture. Her essay collection Vesper Flights (2020) extended her examination of the human relationship with the natural world. She is widely regarded as one of the defining voices in contemporary British nature writing and has received multiple honorary degrees and literary awards.